The Embarke "All-You-Can-Eat" Messaging API: Communicate Across Social Networks but Skip the Coding

As a developer, you can figure out how to make your program connect to Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and Email. Or you can use the Embarke API and connect just to Embarke, a messaging platform that connects you to them all. You can skip learning the specifics of how to connect to each of them. The REST API's website has a five minute tutorial video on how to use this gateway to its developer tools for social communications.

Through embarke you can help users share photos, create an application for group conversations, create a social CRM application among many other use cases.

In an interview with CEO Al Bsharah, Bruce Bigelow of Xconomy says that Embarke helps people who want to stay inside their communication comfort zone communicate outside it.

"In terms of Internet communications, Bsharah says some people simply prefer to use certain channels. So Embarke’s technology allows users to stay in their comfort zone—with e-mail, for example—and still be able to communicate with friends who prefer to use Facebook, Twitter, or text messaging."

“The value we’re providing really boils down to increasing that engagement,” Bsharah said. Embarke’s core technology provides the infrastructure that enables software companies and Software-as-a-service providers to incorporate private and social messaging, he said. “Our customers may just want to communicate with their users better, or they might want to provide our messaging application for consumers.” Embarke provides its technology on a monthly subscription basis, using a tiered pricing model based on the number of messages delivered."

With Embarke, you an integrate your communication channels to quickly launch, engage, and analyze.

I interviewed the president of Realtidbits.com, Kelly Abbott, via email to get a sense of just how Embarke is used by the company. Realtidbits Facebookifies websites by building online communities through commenting, media galleries and forums. Abbott cited Embarke's API as a huge time and cost saver,

"We think of Embarke as a single, all-you-can-eat API endpoint for messaging users. We use it to handle push notifications to users in their preferred device/medium. If one user prefers email notifications and another prefers push notifications via SMS Embarke is the single endpoint we hit to get both users the message. If users want to reply, they can and Embarke hits our API to post updates/replies. As you can imagine the time and effort required to build these processes on our own would be huge. By licensing Embarke, we got ahead of the competition in terms of creating a product with greater engagement potential with little effort and at a low cost."

Embarke's role, from both Abbot's and Embarke's view is simple: Embarke moves clients from a single social medium into all social media.

About the author:Greg Bates
A writer for Programmableweb since 2012, Greg is a freelance writer and a maniacal editor of dissertations and term papers. - Follow me on Google+